January 1981: Unleash The Wretched Excess

Or, "Reagan Is Shah"...

Performance flyer, 1980 campaign season.

Ladies Against Women (LAW),
San Francisco.


Image and story (More below)***



Some quotes from Paul Slansky; The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American '80s, 1989.

January 12, 1980—

TV PREMIERE: Dynasty. With Dallas firmly entrenched at the top of the Nielsen ratings, ABC premieres its own prime time soap—produced by schlockmeister Aaron (Charlie's Angels) Spelling—about a rich multi-generational oil family, the Carringtons of Denver, who share the Ewings' idiosyncrasy of all living in the same house. Unlike the critically underappreciated Dallas—which, thanks largely to Larry Hagman's hilarious portrayal of J.R., can also be enjoyed as a satire of corporate America—Dynasty is merely a celebration of wealth, a campy wallow in which the absurd plots and inane dialogue are incidental to the garish fashions. It becomes a huge hit.

Starting January 17—

The most expensive inaugural celebration in American history—an $11 million, four-day parade of white ties, limousines and mink that prompts Reagan partisan Barry Goldwater to complain about such an "ostentatious" display "at a time when most people can't hack it"—gets underway in Washington.

The festivities climax in an inauguration Gore Vidal will call "a long and beautiful commercial to Adolfo, Blass, Saint Laurent, Galanos, de la Renta, and Halston." (Needs library access, but article is here.)

*** I happen to have one of these flyers; couldn't get a good overall scan, but my copy includes a bit missing from the image above:



Californians knew only too well what to expect from Reagan. Still, according to all citations I find, his first public use of "Evil Empire" was in a March 8, 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals.

"Star Wars" came a bit later, and was not his term; it caught on after the March 23, 1983 missiles in space proposal (Strategic Defense Initiative/SDI).

So, it may just be that the Ladies were unusually prescient.

Their printer's bug was only too correct:










Of course, with the level of right-wing lunacy ramped up over the last three decades: except for the correct spelling, these look like routine teabagger messages—